Magician Prince (25 page)

The god of intelligence stood before Sane and
he was awestruck. It never occurred to him even for a second to
question the truth of Wise’s words and that was a sort of proof as
well. Finally he managed to form some sort of a polite response and
said, “It is an honor to meet you, Great One, but if I might ask
how did I come to be here?”

“That answer is simple,” said Wise, “You are
here, because I have need of you and no simple vision will be
enough to set the world back on its proper course. What was the
last thing that you remember before waking here?”

“I was being chased,” said Sane hesitantly.
The images were all a jumble in his head and he was having
difficulty picking them out and recalling the order of events. It
was not unlike trying to remember the details of a dream hours
after waking. “Byrn was there, but… No, I was trying to find Byrn,
because…”

Wise reached out with a gnarled finger and
roughly poked Sane in the forehead. The images aligned in an
instant, leaving Sane to wonder how he could have been so confused
a moment before.

“I had a vision of Xander using Byrn like a
puppet. Xander was trying to stop me from getting to Byrn, but I
found him anyway and a fight broke out. Xander summoned some- I
have to assume they were fire elementals although I have never seen
the creatures before.”

“They were,” Wise confirmed and nodded for
Sane to continue.

“Our combined magic was having little effect,
but Byrn was starting to take control of them when Xander attacked
him from behind.” Sudden disdain welled up inside the sorcerer as
he recalled the mental image of Xander latching onto Byrn with his
tendrils and sucking the energy out of him. Then he felt a rush of
shame by what happened next. “I fled.”

“You would have died, had you not,” assured
Wise. His tone was conversational, but not quite condoning or
admonishing. “You transported into the place you call ‘the void’
without one of your little wood pieces to guide you back to your
own world.”

“Why wasn’t I expelled from this place?” Sane
wondered. “The runes determine where we exit, but even without one
I should have been forced out of the void naturally.”

“And you would have, had I not intervened.
You would have been thrown out into an ocean or the side of a
mountain and then what would be the fate of your kingdom? Dead:
Consumed by Xander Necros or Byrn Aurel depending on how you look
at it.”

Byrn Aurel? That was a strange choice for
Wise to call him considering that Byrn had never claimed that name
for himself, nor had it been bestowed upon him unless things had
changed since coming to the void. “How long have I been here?”

Wise shrugged. “Time is relative. A day to
your kind is like a few moments to a god. Suffice it to say that
more time has passed then you would have liked.”

“What happened to Byrn?” Sane demanded,
speaking more harshly than he had intended.

“Think better of your tone, mortal,” Wise
warned, “You have my favor, but only just so. I can always make
more seers.”

“Please forgive me, Lord Learion,” Sane said
solemnly and hung his head in reverence as decades of serving under
King Kale kicked in. “I spoke out of turn.”

“Your pursuit of knowledge is commendable,”
Wise waved off the apology, “but time grows short. Soon Byrn Aurel
and Xander Necros will clash and without your aid your prince will
lose.

“You must scale the Dragon’s Peak and collect
a tome that is hundreds of years old. It is a black grimoire
written by Xander Necros, though he had a different name back then.
You must get that book to Byrn.”

Sane bowed deeply to Wise and thanked him,
then said. “If I may ask you one more thing before you send me
away: Why do the gods seem to care so much about the affairs of
Byrn Firemas? First, Ashura curses him. Now you ask that I help
him.”

Wise smiled underneath his beard, “We don’t,
or more precisely, we no longer do.”

“Then why-“

The garden of the gods swirled around the
sorcerer. Wise’s bearded grin seemed to bend and twist as the world
enveloped Sane and suddenly he was in the pure white light of the
void that existed between worlds. A feeling of being pushed forced
him through the void and he knew it was Wise directing him. His
body flew at an ever-growing pace until…

Gravity came crashing down on the sorcerer
forcing him to his hands and knees. A cloud of dust kicked up from
his impact into the ground, forcing a thin veil of soil into his
mouth and his one good eye. He coughed for a few minutes while his
mouth tried to expel the dirt. Then Sane rubbed his eye on the
sleeve of his cloak until he could see once again.

His wand lay at his side and Sane picked it
up as he got to his feet. His old bones felt energized like those
of a much younger man and he got a good look around. In front of
him was the base of a mountain that touched the clouds and
disappeared somewhere in the mists. Somewhere up there was Dragon’s
Peak, the mythical home of the dragon race. Sane never believed
that the giant flying lizards existed and had chalked them up to
legends. The old stories told that the dragons left the world not
long after the magician war with the gods nearly devastated the
world thousands of years ago. It was time to find out if the
legends were true.

Sane waved his staff overhead in a circle,
then spun his body twice to make the circular motion more complete
so that he generated a fine rain to fall on him and wash away the
light casing of dirt from his body and clothes. Once he felt
sufficiently cleaned, the sorcerer took his first steps towards
Dragon’s Peak.

The prince’s ship rocked from side to side as
it sailed ever closer to Mollifas. All forty of the surviving
domain magicians and the handful of captured and subsequently
collared Collective magicians had been corralled onto the prince’s
warship. As Byrn had predicted, it did not take long for the prince
and his men to find out that the capital would soon be under attack
and the troops were marched off almost as quickly as they had come
to Wolfsbane.

What Byrn had not planned on was Prince Janus
taking all of his most experienced and elite warriors including the
magicians on the remaining naval vessels. If they had gone by land,
then Byrn would have had ample time to wait for a chance to free
the magicians and escape, but aboard the ship escape was nearly
impossible unless Byrn wanted to stage a mutiny and kill every
normal human aboard the ship and that was an option he was not yet
willing to consider.

Prince Janus- no, it was King Janus now. He
reminded himself for the tenth time. The passing of King Kale still
did not feel real to him, not because they were close and he could
not accept it. Though they had begun to reconcile, Byrn still
hardly knew the man before his passing. The difficulty was in
accepting that Janus, the brother who hated everything that Byrn
stood for with such passion, was now the supreme ruler of all he
surveyed. The irony of it now was that if Janus was killed or
deposed, the crown would fall to King Kale’s last living heir. That
would have been Byrn, but now that body belonged to Xander Necros
and as intensely as Janus hated the magicians, Xander felt just as
strongly towards those he called “lesser humans.” It would be a
shift from one extreme to the other and no matter which of them sat
on the throne it would mean that others would suffer.

The sea salt was refreshing as Byrn took in
the smell surrounded by a few of the other magicians. For the most
part, they were all kept below decks in cramped quarters, but were
rotated up to the deck in small groups to stretch their legs. This
was done to ensure that the magicians did not suffer any undue
atrophy or illness while aboard the vessel. The welcome relief from
the darkness and the growing stink of too many people crowded
together was just a pleasant side effect.

A large man in white armor passed dangerously
close to Byrn and he shrank down amidst the other magicians hoping
that the man would take no notice of him. It was Kellen who had
passed and he was the only person on board who had ever met Xander
Necros. If Kellen was to recognize him, then it could lead to some
uncomfortable questions, or worse, they might try to kill him
outright.

Much of Byrn’s former strength had returned
by now, but Xander’s body was a sad comparison to Byrn’s own. The
old man was much feebler than Byrn was used to. In their proper
forms they might have been equally matched, but the sorcerer had
not known how much Xander was held back by his old bones. It was
only the grandmaster’s vast knowledge of magic that made him such a
formidable foe. Byrn did not want to think about it, but could not
help wondering what Xander was planning to do with his new body. If
an aging Xander Necros could kill ten thousand men, women, and
children in a single day, then what could he accomplish as Byrn
Firemas? Mollifas could already lie in ruins.

A cry of pain broke Byrn from his dark
thoughts and he turned away from the rolling sea to see an older
magician curled up on the deck with his hands over his head. A
younger man he recognized as Kellen’s apprentice, Donovan, stood
over him with a sneer. The Kenzai had taken to tormenting some of
the magicians since they came on board the boat, finding them to be
easy targets that could neither escape his wrath nor fight
back.

“What is the matter? Did you trip, old man?”
Donovan laughed and gave the man a sharp kick. “Go on. Get up.” The
old man whimpered to be left alone, but did not move from his place
on the floor. Donovan’s boot came up and delivered another kick.
This time it landed squarely in its victim’s gut and caused the
elderly man to vomit, much of which found a home on Donovan’s pants
and boots. “You son of a whore!” Donovan spat on the man and drew
his sword. Byrn noticed as the energy passed from Donovan and into
his weapon causing it to spring to life with its blue light. The
image startled him for a moment as he came to realize something
very important, but pushed the thought aside as Donovan was about
to run the man through.

Byrn threw his body into that of the Kenzai
knocking him off balance so that his sword only met with the deck
and he immediately regretted the action as a massive jolt of pain
shot up his elderly arm where they had collided. Donovan whirled on
Byrn and leveled his sword at the aged sorcerer. “You! How dare you
touch me?”

“It was an accident,” said Byrn, putting his
hands up in surrender. “The rocking of the ship put me off
balance.”

“Don’t lie to me.” Donovan scowled and drew
closer backing Byrn against the rail.

“I can’t lie,” said Byrn tugging at the
collar around his neck with a hooked thumb under it.

Donovan took a step back, seeming as if he
might back off, but was still unable to walk away. Byrn had
embarrassed him and the Kenzai would need to assert his dominance
much like a neighborhood bully who feared losing control over those
that were supposed to cower before him. Donovan flipped the sword
over and meant to strike Byrn’s face with its butt- a blow that
would surely have shattered his jaw, but Byrn sidestepped the
upward strike and Donovan’s own momentum carried him into the
railing. Now behind him, Byrn saw an opportunity and grabbed
Donovan’s ankles. He channeled a wisp of magic into his tired
muscles and lifted the Kenzai’s feet up so that he toppled over the
side of the ship.

A loud splash came a second later when
Donovan landed in the water and magicians and normal humans alike
looked over the rail as Donovan was quickly being left behind.

“Man overboard!” came the call from somewhere
on the aft deck and a man began to wave some flags in short, jutted
movements for the trailing ships to see. As their ship sailed
forward another behind them was slowing and a lifeboat was being
lowered down to fetch the floundering Donovan.

Once the spectacle was over most of the ship
hands went back to their business, but Kellen came to question the
magicians a minute later. He stood a head taller than any of the
magicians and regarded them in silence for a minute. “Who wants to
tell me what happened?”

No one answered. If Kellen had worded his
question a bit differently, the collars would have compelled the
magicians to answer, but no one actually wanted to answer and so no
one did.

He looked the magicians over and came to the
one that Donovan had been kicking. The old man was on his feet now
and clearly still in considerable pain from the beating he had
received. “Go below deck and find one of the priests. Tell him that
Knight-Commander Kellen wants your injuries tended to. The magician
thanked him with relief and did as he was told.

Then Kellen picked another magician and his
tone was firmer. “Chance, tell me what happened.”

The second magician looked as if he did not
want to answer, but had no choice. “That man pushed him over,” his
finger pointed at Byrn, but he quickly added, “but he had no
choice.
Kenzai
Donovan was going to kill him.”

For perhaps the first time Kellen really took
notice of Byrn, who tried to appear as unassuming as he could under
the Kenzai master’s stare. He watched intently for any sort of
flare up in energy from Kellen, but there was none. “Why did
Donovan try to kill you?”

Among Kenzai, Kellen was perhaps one of the
most reasonable that Byrn had ever met when it came to dealing with
magicians. Kellen could be reasoned with as long as the magician in
question was not a member of the Collective. So he answered
truthfully for the most part, explaining about Donovan’s
mistreatment of the old magician and only providing minor
adjustments when it came to pushing Donovan and tossing him
overboard- actions that would have been too aggressive for a
magician wearing a working control collar to perform.